The Editorial Board of The Times-Picayune in New Orleans, LA, cites a study by the Educational Research Alliance for New Orleans, an organization dedicated to understanding the post-Katrina school reforms, that found principals at K-12 schools have been manipulating the application process in order to avoid taking students they didn’t want. Some pressured students to transfer, kept quiet about open seats, held invitation-only recruitment events and cherry-picked which students to accept as mid-year transfers.

When Lousiana’s state-run Recovery School District rolled out OneApp, an automated application and enrollment system, in February 2012, it allowed parents to fill out a single application, ranking several school choices, and matched them with individual school admission criteria (which can be factored into the process).